Employee Experience Design Lab Berlinhttps://www.ex-lab.de
Employee Experience, Design Sprint, Design Thinking Education - Train-the-Trainer - Remote CoachingThu, 05 Mar 2020 18:51:55 +0000en-US
hourly
1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.4.1https://i1.wp.com/www.ex-lab.de/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/cropped-3w20-Logo-square-new-1-e1550006274688-1.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1Employee Experience Design Lab Berlinhttps://www.ex-lab.de
3232157784136Introducing Employee Experience Designhttps://www.ex-lab.de/2020/02/07/introducing-employee-experience-design/
https://www.ex-lab.de/2020/02/07/introducing-employee-experience-design/#respondFri, 07 Feb 2020 10:54:17 +0000https://www.ex-lab.de/?p=12362Every month we get together virtually to talk about Employee Experience Design, our work and insights. And also, we answer all your questions. This was the first session in this series. If you want to take part in the future, just sign up here If you want to find out more about our work with […]

Curious about EX Design Sprints? How they work and what you can achieve with them?

Sign up and we will send you more information via email

]]>https://www.ex-lab.de/2020/02/07/introducing-employee-experience-design/feed/012362Creative Onboarding — Virtual Meetuphttps://www.ex-lab.de/2019/12/24/creative-onboarding-virtual-meetup/
https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/12/24/creative-onboarding-virtual-meetup/#respondTue, 24 Dec 2019 14:00:42 +0000https://www.3w20.com/?p=11837We created a Virtual Meetup Series to explore EX Design topics in the wild! If you don’t want to miss the next time — Sign up for our Newsletter at the very end of the page! New trends are turning on-boarding programs from simple orientation to strategic processes. There’s plenty of research about what matters […]

We created a Virtual Meetup Series to explore EX Design topics in the wild! If you don’t want to miss the next time — Sign up for our Newsletter at the very end of the page!

New trends are turning on-boarding programs from simple orientation to strategic processes.

There’s plenty of research about what matters for the new hires and their team during the first 6 months. Likewise there is bunch of ideas and trends on how to spice up your on-boarding programs to cover those needs. But we know every company is different: goals, culture and processes. How can you create one for your own needs?

“When it comes to onboarding, you really have to live your values and show them in action — not have a fancy powerpoint slide with them listed”

There is no one-size fits all. Marie and Vinay tell us about how they created their very own onboarding journey for their new hires.

Eager to create remarkable Employee Experiences for your team?

Get the most effective toolbox to design any aspect of your Employee Experience on your own! We created 6 Modules to guide you through the design process in few easy steps for you to do it with your team. It can be that easy!

]]>https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/12/24/creative-onboarding-virtual-meetup/feed/011837Kicking off a Project with your Team in the Era of New Workhttps://www.ex-lab.de/2019/09/03/kicking-off-a-project-with-your-team-in-the-era-of-new-work/
https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/09/03/kicking-off-a-project-with-your-team-in-the-era-of-new-work/#respondTue, 03 Sep 2019 18:50:21 +0000https://www.3w20.com/?p=10463Project heads will have to shift their function from a top down organizer to a on eye-level facilitator of purpose, work and learning. Kicking off a project becomes more than a briefing of what you want to do and who does what and when. Gone are the days of hurried project managers rushing to conference […]

Project heads will have to shift their function from a top down organizer to a on eye-level facilitator of purpose, work and learning.

Kicking off a project becomes more than a briefing of what you want to do and who does what and when. Gone are the days of hurried project managers rushing to conference rooms, carrying a laptop to add the last few point to the project roadmap.

Rethink Kickoffs. It is a critical moment not of managing & organising, but of setting up and building a team.

Why is that?

We work in times, where we need to rely on a multitude of expert colleagues that have special domain knowledge or experiences. Challenges have become so complex that we cannot master them ourselves. Organising work, structuring knowledge will lose its importance because it will get messier. What counts is to make sense on the spot, use the information you have to make a decision to move forward. If you work with other people, that requires a relationship. Teamwork becomes essential. And I am not talking about group-work, where people reluctantly split the pile of tasks that need to be done with deadlines and a shared folder. I am talking about teamwork, where people act proactively, think on their feet, are in the flow, reflect and share their knowledge, progress and make sense of their work together. When they fail, they try something different; and when they achieve something they celebrate success appropriately 🎉😃

It is a radical different thing. It is hard to describe, but everyone who has been in those two situations feels the difference. Have you ever? What did you notice? What was different? Please leave a comment! Let’s share and make it more clear!

3 messages are vital to communicate when you start something with a team!

Your leadership role! (hey, that’s you, accept it! Leader!)

You cannot do it on your own. Share with the team how you see your role: that you are tasked with this, but you need to work together, come together to make things fly. Invite them to full collaborate with you. That means asking for help, listening to others, and identifying your own blindspots and limitations.

What about the teammembers?

First, communicate why the people that are in the team are crucial to the success of the project. They are a vital and without them, it would not be possible. This creates an emotional commitment to the project. Make it transparent why they are there. Tell them that you carefully selected them. That each and everyone has a function and that all the experiences and skills are needed. If this is not the case: you don’t need a team! Second, communicate the behaviours you expect from them to them. Speaking up, voicing concerns, giving feedback, providing input, sharing knowledge etc.pp. Don’t do this like I just did. Do this is in clear and simple words, give examples of situations, maybe even cartoons, whatever it takes, really. Team rules — I like to do principles, same thing, different word, whole new perception — are a great way to make this a shared and common effort. Propose a few and then collect them with your team together. Protip: with everything that is proposed, ask: what does that mean in a concrete situation? Agree of a few important ones. Write them down, hang them in the office, put them underneath each e-mail, print cups, create a song…whatever is necessary to remind everyone about them.

Why are you doing this project?

A general rule would be: even a bad purpose is better than to give no purpose. If you leave this blank, you kickstart the imagination of your team. And you know how the human brain works, in the absence of a reason, things can turn negative and very twisty. Best practice is to externalise the reason d’être and make it positive. So, instead of saying: “This project will safe our financial future”, or “this project will make us competitive again”, make it about a user or a customer that you will help, empower to achieve something better/faster in his or her life. Don’t try to motivate by fear but be inspiring, make the goals relatable and desirable. Make sure everyone in the teams knows this, don’t be afraid to tell and re-tell this like a broken record. It is important.

Share with us your worst kick-off experience!

Reading this, it seems obvious but think back…. I bet you can list a handful or projects, right from the top of your head, where purpose was not really given (but assumed! I mean, hey, it is your work, you just have to do it, don’t you?) or was very shallow. It is crazy! I invite you to share your worst kick-off experience in the comments below, so we can analyze and see what went wrong to learn learn learn!

This is part of a series about the Future of Work, hey, whatever that means, I understand it like that: Teamwork! That is the future of work, sound lame? Well, I agree. Teams have been around forever, but sadly we haven’t even begun to dig deep into their powers. Why? Management theory basically: How companies worked in the past and how we learned how they should operate! Teams are everywhere but their potential is caped, cut short by ego, by structure and by an unwholesome — what a word — attitude to work. In this series I will explore this, sharing learnings from my experience, my work and a whole a lotta books!

]]>https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/09/03/kicking-off-a-project-with-your-team-in-the-era-of-new-work/feed/010463The biggest challenges for HR to transform their Organisations into Agile Organismshttps://www.ex-lab.de/2019/07/25/agile-hr-meetup-2/
https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/07/25/agile-hr-meetup-2/#respondThu, 25 Jul 2019 15:21:25 +0000https://www.3w20.com/?p=11874What is the future of the workplace? How we will be working in 2022? Innovation is a MUST HAVE nowadays for any company. Markets are being disrupted without mercy by smaller players who have the mindset and ways of working to respond to people’s ever changing needs. That’s what AGILITY is about. That’s precisely what […]

What is the future of the workplace? How we will be working in 2022?

Innovation is a MUST HAVE nowadays for any company. Markets are being disrupted without mercy by smaller players who have the mindset and ways of working to respond to people’s ever changing needs. That’s what AGILITY is about. That’s precisely what companies DO NOT have.

Working in the innovation field with Design Thinking for 5 years we believe INNOVATION CANNOT BE ANOTHER SILO. Innovation is a mindset that needs to be lived by everyone in organisations for it to really happen. Since innovation comes with agility, how can we make everyone, at all levels, work in a more agile way?

We believe HR is the answer.

In July we got together with 20 professionals in the area of HR, software development and SCRUM facilitation we use Design Thinking to create ways for HR to embrace their role as drivers and facilitate the change to their colleagues.

Documentation

Get the documentation of our insights!

Give us your email and we will to share with you the complete documentation plus the slides “The Role of HR in the Digital Age” by Jelena Jelusic from Ai, Croatia.

]]>https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/07/25/agile-hr-meetup-2/feed/011874Microlearning — Psychological Safety for high performing teamshttps://www.ex-lab.de/2019/06/19/micro-learning-psycholgical-safety/
https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/06/19/micro-learning-psycholgical-safety/#respondWed, 19 Jun 2019 09:15:26 +0000https://www.3w20.com/?p=10020Psychological Safety describes a climate in which people feel free to express thoughts and feelings, take risks and ask for help without fearing that the consequences of these actions will impact their image or would be held on them in the future. The term was coined by Harvard researcher Amy Edmodson after studying teams in […]

Psychological Safety describes a climate in which people feel free to express thoughts and feelings, take risks and ask for help without fearing that the consequences of these actions will impact their image or would be held on them in the future.

The term was coined by Harvard researcher Amy Edmodson after studying teams in healthcare. Now the term and its importance has gained more traction after Google revealed the results of their 2 years research “Project Aristotle” where they had the goal of identifying what makes a group people a highly effective team.

When we think of high performing and creative teams we tend to think they are formed by highly qualified individuals who together form the best team possible. Nevertheless, research has demonstrated that it is not about WHO are in the team so much but instead HOW they work together.

Symptoms of unsafe environments

Any group of people set up to collaborate develops visible and unspoken norms that define how they function. This norms are established by recurrent behaviours performed by one or more integrants of the group. Examples of these norms are:

Interrupting when someone is speaking is accepted:

Asking questions means that you are not good at your job

It is okay to invalidate other people’s ideas

Only experts can express their opinions

These unspoken norms are a result of toxic behaviours triggered by a work culture based on hierarchy and control where everyone invest their time in “Impressions Management” which means avoiding to be perceived as ignorant, intrusive, incompetent or negative.

The problem is that these “Impressions Management” efforts kill the behaviours necessary to foster a culture of innovation. So people do not ask questions to avoid being perceived as ignorant, the do not admit mistakes by fear of being judged as incompetent, they do not offer new ideas to not be intrusive and they do not challenge the status quo to not be perceived as negative. As you can see, these behaviours prevent teams from experimenting and finding new solutions together.

What to do instead?

It results that most likely it is not about motivating your colleagues, chances are they are full of new ideas and drive to experiment with new things. The crucial thing is eliminating the judging and the fear of making mistakes by creating a space where motivation is welcomed and unleashed with actions. To accomplish that it is necessary to practice and adopt certain norms that will create the Psychological Safety necessary for that to happen:

+ Everybody voice opinions equally: No one dominates the conversation

+ Helping each other is a must: Asking for help is courageous, offering help is caring

+ Dare to propose new ideas:New ideas are welcomed by the team and build on top

+ Addressing difficult issues is a healthy: Failure is seen as a learning path and is welcomed and celebrated. Feedback encouraged is appreciated.

Psychological Safety is particularly necessary in work environments with high uncertainty and interdependency, as is the case in innovation. Managers fear that high levels of Psychological Safety could reduce accountability and quality of results. As Prof. Edmondson tells in her TedTalk, it hasn’t been demonstrated yet that high Psychological Safety leads to slacking off but what is for sure is that high accountability produces high levels of anxiety inhibiting experimentation and risk taking. Depends on you where would you like to play!

Text

Programme

This month we will be practicing behaviours to help you create more Psychological Safety within your team. The behaviours will be the following:

Week 0 Self awareness

Week 1 Giving voice to everyone

Weak 2 Creating space for help

Week 3 Daring with new ideas

Week 4 Addressing difficult issues

Sign Up

Join our Microlearning Letter to get your monthly skill training directly in your inbox. Each letter is complemented with 4 weeks of practical exercises for you to develop the right skills to innovate. If you’d like to receive the exercises sign up for the letter.

]]>https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/06/19/micro-learning-psycholgical-safety/feed/010020Why I stopped doing Warm Ups…https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/05/24/why-i-stopped-doing-warm-ups-in-design-thinking-workshops-with-corporates/
https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/05/24/why-i-stopped-doing-warm-ups-in-design-thinking-workshops-with-corporates/#respondFri, 24 May 2019 13:06:34 +0000https://www.3w20.com/?p=9981For some reason we have learned that Design Thinking workshops NEED to have warm ups. We accepted that and went with the flow. When I learned Design Thinking, it was not inside my work environment and nevertheless those weird games I HAD to do did not help me to be creative at all. It actually […]

For some reason we have learned that Design Thinking workshops NEED to have warm ups. We accepted that and went with the flow. When I learned Design Thinking, it was not inside my work environment and nevertheless those weird games I HAD to do did not help me to be creative at all. It actually did the opposite: I felt self-concious and closed myself. No wonder why warm ups are a big pain for Corporate Design Thinking Coaches. Let’s face it, unless you are a coach working inside an organisation you don’t get how hard it is to do a warm up in there.

Your reputation is in jeopardy!

When you are a trainer, coach or consultant on hire, you leave after the workshop and c’est tout. But, when you are an insider your reputation, image and professionalism is in jeopardy. It sounds dramatic but sadly it is like that. When I started to work in Nestlé as an innovation coach, I learned right away to censor myself when it came to warm ups. They always left me with self-Fremdscham seeing participants feeling inhibited after the Danish Clapping Game (I still have trauma a with that warm up by the way). I realised certain warm ups became more of a mindset roadblock than enabler, keeping me from achieving what I wanted: make people try new ways of working!

Think of your colleagues

It is already hard enough for your colleagues to try a different way to do their work and accept you as a “teacher” so don’t push their limits. I’ve found out that in work environments people are reserved to show their full personality and personal aspects. So build trust slowly and work hard to create a safe environment (the how comes next).

Ok what to do instead?

I decided to not put that extra pressure on myself and my colleagues and created a list of “Safe Warm ups for Corporates” that have worked for me and that you will find bellow. I also coined a series of best practices to benefit from warm ups avoiding the backfire:

If you are more of a listener here is a video from our YouTube channel, if you’d rather read, please scroll down 😀

Explain the WHY, always

Purpose is the base of experiential learning and corporates want to know why they need to do something. Otherwise they would consider it a waste of time. Explain what warm ups are for and why are they important when working with Design Thinking since they help to get into the right mindset for the exercises to come. Then introduce the warm up and explain what you’re trying to achieve with it. Do not reveal everything though, you want to do a reflection afterwards and shine when people point out what they learned despite their skepticism.

Do not force anyone. Period.

I encourage you to remember this phrase “Everything you do in this workshop is voluntary”. Yes we want to change mindsets and show people different ways of doing things but this won’t happen if people feel obliged to do something against their will.

Be a role model

If you want participants to do weird things, be the first one doing them.

Create a safe space

I’ve been hearing a lot about Psychological Safety as a key ingredient for this. It means creating an environment where there is no judgement and no fear of making mistakes. Being a role model here works wonders for this, be the first acknowledging to not know something for example, people would follow. Another way could be with warm ups that foster conversations about similar experiences so people can find commonalities among them.

Choose your warm ups wisely

Lower the barrier for people to engage, bear in mind it is hard to do new things in front of big group of people. Start with warm ups in pairs, maybe including writing or drawing. Do not make them play Ninjas as an opening activity!

The Safe List

I arranged the warm ups by the different stages of a Design Thinking workshop, you can find the explanations in ourCoachbot. The what, why and how is in there. Which ones have worked for you? We’d love to feed our Coachbot with more warm ups 😀

]]>https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/05/24/why-i-stopped-doing-warm-ups-in-design-thinking-workshops-with-corporates/feed/09981Building our personas using Jobs-To-Be-Donehttps://www.ex-lab.de/2019/02/10/part-1-who-are-the-people-behind-it/
https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/02/10/part-1-who-are-the-people-behind-it/#respondSun, 10 Feb 2019 12:47:29 +0000https://www.3w20.com/?p=9503The main assumption came from our experience building a Design Thinking Community of Practice for Nestlé. It is after the trainings when things get challenging for the newly trained coaches. Since each of them has a different reality and role inside the organisation, their situations are so unique that a training cannot give all the answers. […]

The main assumption came from our experience building a Design Thinking Community of Practice for Nestlé. It is after the trainings when things get challenging for the newly trained coaches. Since each of them has a different reality and role inside the organisation, their situations are so unique that a training cannot give all the answers. They build them on the go. So we decided to create a new set of services for newly trained Design Thinking coaches who are starting to introduce the method inside organisations.

After mapping out a user journey on how a roll out of Design Thinking could look like inside companies, we realised that actually the needs of these coaches evolve depending of which stage of the journey they are. So the same person could be different personas and therefore have different needs along the road. That’s why we decided to focus more on Jobs To Be Done and leave persona descriptions aside in order to get more concrete.

Jobs To Be DoneTool

“Personas look at roles and attributes. JTBD looks at situations and motivations”. This framework asks us to evolve from “needs”, which most of the time end up being functional, into a more comprehensive framework that includes the context and the emotional and social aspects of the progress a person is trying to achieve. Then the resulting services will speak clearly to the users because they add value in different dimensions of their struggle.

After some interviews, we have identified two user groups, take a look to the first one:

The Fresh Coach!

PersonaTool

These people have just left an amazing Design Thinking training. They experienced how effective and delightful it is to work in a team with creative methods that push into creating tangible solutions. They see how valuable the methodology is but also how different it is from what they’re used to do. They are inspired, refreshed and ready to work with DT everyday and forever!

Like in Plato’s cave, The Fresh Coach have seen the light and want to show it to their peers. But once back in the “cave”, people find it hard to understand what they have experienced . On the other side, The Fresh Coaches find it hard to articulate what they learned to inspire others to try it out. Where to start? Common questions: What kind of projects can benefit from DT? How can I design and organize a workshop for my peers if I have only coached few times? How can I be sure that my workshop will deliver the outcomes my peers expect? What would they think of me telling them to work so different from what we’re used to?

Jobs To Be DoneTool

Now as Christensen says, Jobs To Be Done are like a mini documentary of your user. So we tried to write it using the well known framework of: “When I (Situation), I want (Progress I try to achieve), So I (Expected outcomes)”

“WHEN I come back to work after a Design Thinking training, I WANT TO feel confident to guide teams working with the method SO they can create more innovative solutions for the company”

We had the feeling the framework was missing somehow the roadblocks, which explain the context better to design more focused solutions. Therefore we added a BUT to generate some creative tension. So let’s see some jobs we fleshed out:

WHEN I come back to work after a Design Thinking training, I WANT TO feel confident to guide teams working with the method SO they can create more innovative solutions for the company BUT…

… I have little experience and have no one to validate my approach.

… my manager is expecting quick results and I cannot tell him the training was not enough.

… my colleagues are skeptic to try out and I don’t know how to convince them

… I need to keep up with my D2D and have no time to create the materials needed

The Jobs changed a lot when adding the roadblocks, some are functional but mainly emotional. As we can see, depending on the job we choose or how we combine them, solutions will be different.

Takeaways

Depending on how much context you add to a JTBD the solution becomes more concrete.

It is important to understand the whole context in which the user is immersed to create better fitting solutions for them.

Do you feel identified or know someone in these situations? What other challenges or opportunities The Fresh Coach encounters? Do you think this is all wrong and the reality is different? Let us know your thoughts! We are more than happy to get some feedback!

]]>https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/02/10/part-1-who-are-the-people-behind-it/feed/09503Research: User Journeys & Pretotypeshttps://www.ex-lab.de/2019/01/12/research-user-journeys/
https://www.ex-lab.de/2019/01/12/research-user-journeys/#respondSat, 12 Jan 2019 13:20:31 +0000https://www.3w20.com/?p=9603It all started with a pain we felt. After trainings, participants can not easily see where and how they can apply their new learned skills and the new mindset of teamwork, in the projects and processes they are involved in. We want to do something about this. Our goal was to research, to dig deeper […]

It all started with a pain we felt. After trainings, participants can not easily see where and how they can apply their new learned skills and the new mindset of teamwork, in the projects and processes they are involved in. We want to do something about this. Our goal was to research, to dig deeper into the heaviest pain points in their journey of bringing another way of working to their company.

First we felt the need to research our assumptions. We recruited contacts from our network, people we have worked with before that know and practice Design Thinking and have been challenged with the task of implementing it in a larger organizational context. We scheduled 3 calls with innovation managers and Design Thinking practitioners from different companies. All 3 are familiar with Design Thinking and have been trained to apply it in their companies.

User JourneysTool

Digging deep but with an overview

In order to mark down meaningful questions for our inquiry, we started by making sense and structuring our experiences. We used the knowledge we had by mapping out a user journey of a innovation manager that wants to be trained in Design Thinking and consequently want to bring this methodology into his company.

We wanted to have a holistic but meta view on the whole process, so we chose 7 steps from the first wish for DT training to having a community of practice inside the company. To not overcomplicate it we just used three categories for these steps: Pain points, pain-relievers and cherries on top. We ended up not using the cherries. Our knowledge was not deep enough to think about surprising, unexpected and delightful elements of our service. We did not map out our service but the status quo of this people because we are in the research phase, still exploring the problem. We have a very high level of how a solution could look like but we don’t know yet the basic requirements expected by the user, so how can we think about unexpected?

See, user journeys can be used in different contexts, in various phases to achieve different goals. This time we used it to dig deeper into a problem and distill research questions. Other times, user journeys are a good way to make sense out of insights or frame a POV. There is no right way, use the methods how they make sense, not how it is written in one book!

This is how our user journey looked like

PretotypesTool

Pretotypes: Prototypes for Research

When we started making our way through the journey ideas kept popping up, how to solve this, how to relieve that pain etc. so we decided to write them down on the bottom. In the next step we prototyped these ideas to use them as Pretotypes in our user research. This will enable us to have a focused conversations with our interviewees that go deep quickly.

But Pretotypes also come with a risk: we can feel comfortable with our assumptions. Prototypes are great for opening a conversation, conveying an idea very fast and to the point and keeping the conversation focused. Our Pretotype is a concept, basically a landing page which describes the service and its benefits shortly. So, why do we have to be careful? Because we are already falling in love with our idea and the questions for the verification of the pain points are rather narrow. Too much on the validation side. Yes, we want to verify the assumptions of our solution, but this is also research, so we have to remind ourselves to open up the conversation for different stories and experiences of our users, to not head down like a racehorse with blinders down the only track we can think right now of.

Next up: Research Interviews and Pretotype Testing

Again! We are using prototypes for research. Because: why not! 1. We covered the basic research through our experience, so we knew we had something there but wanted to dig deeper fast. 2. We wanted to avert the risk when talking too abstract with the user. In this higher conversational level people mostly agree — especially corporate types. People have different understanding of words, e.g. „training“ or „support“. The fact that prototypes are concrete and tangible allows the user to better understand and imagine what you mean. When you show them an example of how it could look like, it is easier to not agree. And this is what you want! Prototypes are great for communicating an idea that should be challenged